Mike Sandbothe

The Temporalization of Time in Modern Philosophy

The subject of 'time' has occupied both scholars and the layman repeatedly
throughout the course of the twentieth century, but has acquired particular
importance and a certain brisance over the last two decades. The current vogue
for time is a multidisciplinary one, in fields ranging from the humanities,
social sciences, history, literature, media theory and linguistics through to
medicine, law, sciences and economics. This situation, characterized by a plurality
of heterogenous concepts, lends particular significance to philosophical debate
about the problem of time. The central problem for contemporary philosophy is
to relate to one another the varying conceptions of time developing in individual
disciplines. The different approaches to this task are embedded in the following
three basic tendencies which define the contemporary philosophy of time.

1. The Three Basic Tendencies in Contemporary Philosophy of Time

The first basic tendency in contemporary philosophy of time may be described
as the tendency to unify our understanding of time. The protagonists of this
unification tendency are convinced that time's validity is
that of being a new Archimedean Point which unifies our everyday experience
of the self and the world with our academic theories about nature and man. This
point of unification, they contend, has been emphasized time and time again
in philosophy (for instance by von Baader, Schelling, Bergson or Whitehead),
but has been ignored for far too long by science and technology. It wasn't until
the second half of this century that a global time concept was developed and
mathematically implemented at the interface between physics, chemistry and biology
within the framework of the so-called theories of "self-organization".
According to the proponents of the unification tendency this new conception
of time enables the old duality between natural time and historical time to
be overcome and resolves the conflict between physical, biological and philosophical
approaches to time which had characterized the first half of the twentieth century.
Against this background the German theoretician of time, Hermann Lübbe,
observed, "that even the temporal structure of historicality, which, according
to Heidegger and the hermeneutic theory which followed him, results exclusively
from the subject's relationship to itself, which constitutes meaning, is in
reality a structure belonging to all open and dynamic systems which is indifferent
to the subject matter." Lübbe's convergence theorem can be supported
by the deliberations of the Nobel prize-winning physicist, chemist and self-organization
theorist Ilya Prigogine, who noted as early as 1973, in the light of his thermodynamic
theory of irreversibility: "Whatever the future of these ideas, it seems
to me that the dialogue between physics and natural philosophy can begin on
a new basis. I don't think that I can exaggerate by stating that the problem
of time marks specifically the divorce between physics on one side, psychology
and epistemology on the other. (...). We see that physics is starting to overcome
these barriers."

The convergence theorem, which lies at the heart of the unification tendency
in contemporary philosophy of time, remains however by no means undisputed.
Paul Ricoeur, the French phenomenologist, opposes this for example with his
diagnosis of an inpenetrable incommensurability between historical and natural
time. Ricoeur's outset serves to illustrate the second basic tendency in contemporary
philosophy of time, namely the tendency to split time into a multitude of mutually
incompatible heterogenous concepts. As a representative of this pluralization
tendency, Ricoeur regards "the break, on the level of epistemology,
between phenomenological time on the one hand and astronomical, physical, and
biological time on the other" as being insurmountable. In the light of
the underlying discontinuity which exists "between a time without a present
[natural time - M.S.] and a time with a present [historical time - M.S.]"
, Ricoeur describes the alleged coherence between the two heterogenous understandings
of time as being "a phenomenon of mutual contamination" through which
"the notion of history had been extrapolated from the human sphere to the
natural sphere."

From Ricoeur's perspective, the "reciprocal overlapping of the notions
of change (or evolution) and history" is factually without foundation,
and is as such to be refuted. Ricoeur reasons, "whatever the interferences
between the time with a present and the time without a present, they presuppose
the fundamental distinction between an anonymous instant and a present defined
by the instance of discourse that designates this present reflexively."
Hence, to Ricoeur, "it (...) seems impossible (...) to include phenomenological
time in the time of nature, whether it is a question of quantum time, thermodynamic
time, the time of galactic transformations, or that of the evolution of species."
Phenomenological time consisting in a dimension of future, past and present
is explained by Ricoeur as being appropriate only in the narrative medium. And
time in the narrative "refiguration" itself becomes comprehensible
only up to a point. Finally, for Ricoeur, time marks the "mystery"
in our thought which denies representation in that our existence irrevocably
pervades our thinking. This negativistic feature of Ricoeur's is also found
in Emmanuel Levinas' and Michael Theunissen's philosophical thoughts on time.

The third basic trend in contemporary philosophy of time is best seen when
one considers the common assumptions which relate the thesis of convergence
and its antithesis of an irreconcilable divergence between natural and historical
time. In both cases time is considered as being a basic universal structure
which disavows itself of historical contingency and cultural change. Those who
advocate the tendency towards unification regard the "ontological universality
of the temporality aspect" as having been proved through the unity of historized
natural time in theories of self-organization. Proponents of the incommensurability
of time argue quite differently, but reach a similar result. According to them,
the plurality of time refers to a negative unity in time, which even in principle
defies representation, but which seems to be factually evident through the experience
of its unrepresentability. Ricoeur for example sees the narrative "totalization"
and the associated "universal ambition of the metahistorical categories
of historical thought" as being confirmed in the essentially irreconcilable
phenomenological "fundamental" of our experience of time.

The third basic tendency which is of importance in the contemporary philosophy
of time deviates from the two previously discussed with regard to the universality
and ahistoricality of time presupposed by the first two tendencies. Supporters
of the third tendency, the tendency to relativize and historize time,
assume that the role time plays for human understanding of the self and of the
world is an aspect of practical means of interaction with the world, which is
culturally divergent and, within individual cultures, subject to change over
time. The American pragmatist Richard Rorty represents this basic idea with
particular refinement. According to Rorty, a radical approach to time must do
away with the conception, based on theology, that time and eternity come together
in man. This old, prevalent, totalitarian philosophy has had its day. Instead
of this Rorty demands, "that we [should] try to get to the point where
we no longer worship anything, where we treat nothing as a
quasi divinity, where we treat everything - our language, our conscience,
our community - as a product of time and chance." According to Rorty, we
will only achieve this when we no longer mystify time, but understand it in
a radically reflexive way as being a product of chance.

The interrelations between the different conceptions of time which are currently
being discussed in academia, as well as the question of the relationship between
academic and everyday perceptions of time, are to be dealt with pragmatically
on the basis of the historization tendency, as represented by Rorty. The convergence
of different vocabularies of time is, from Rorty's perspective, by no means
proof of an intrinsic coincidence between natural and historical time. The transfer
of the vocabulary of historical time from the context of human self-description
into the realms of the natural world, as well as the mathematically operational
implementation of time, illustrate only the historical ability to adapt, inner
flexibility and contextual feedback even in a highly attuned vocabulary such
as that found in physics and mathematics. In Rorty's view, the different vocabularies
which we make use of for differing purposes and in varying contexts are to be
understood as neither convergent in an intrinsic sense, nor as being essentially
incommensurate in a phenomenological sense. Rather, they are themselves subject
to change over time, through which they become related and disjoined in various
ways according to the various historical situations which arise.

The radical temporalization of time which is expressed in these deliberations
has already been outlined literarily by the Austrian novelist Robert Musil.
In his novel The Man without Qualities he writes, "The train of
events is a train unrolling its rails ahead of itself. The river of time is
a river sweeping its banks along with it. The traveller moves about on a solid
floor between solid walls; but the floor and the walls are being moved along
too, imperceptibly, and yet in very lively fashion, by the movements that his
fellow-travellers make." The inner reflexivity in the modern apprehension
of time, which Musil enounces here, was introduced within philosophy by the
differing approaches of Kant and Heidegger respectively. The second part of
my considerations concerns itself with this twofold foundation, in which the
debate between universality and ahistoricality of time on the one hand and relativity
and historicality of time on the other hand is central.

2) The Reflexive Temporalization of Time in Modern Philosophy by Kant and
Heidegger

The transcendental philosophy of time, from Kant's Transcendental Aesthetic
in the Critique of Pure Reason, may be described as the Magna Carta
of modern philosophy of time. In the Critique, Kant ordained time as
being reflexive, i.e. with recourse to the basic constitution of human subjectivity
as being "a pure form of sensible intuition." There is almost no single
philosophical theory which has been so oft misunderstood as this, Kant's designation
of time as a pure form of sensible intuition. The standard misinterpretation
is that Kant, with his theory, had refuted the reality of time and downgraded
it to being a mere subjective illusion. This miscomprehension is widespread
not only amongst philosophers but, above all, amongst scientists.

The following quote from the British philosopher, and founder of analytical
philosophy of time, John M.E. McTaggart provides a significant example of the
insistence with which this miscomprehension had established itself within philosophy.
In his famous 1908 essay The Unreality of Time he writes, "In
philosophy, again, time is treated as unreal by Spinoza, by Kant, by Hegel and
by Schopenhauer." Scientists such as Albert Einstein or Kurt Gödel
also went along with this prejudice. Gödel, whose view was that time had
lost its "objective meaning" through the "relativity of simultaneity"
which Einstein had proven, writes: "In short, it seems that one obtains
an unequivocal proof for the view of those philosophers who, like Parmenides,
Kant, and the modern idealists, deny the objectivity of change and consider
change as an illusion or an appearance due to our special mode of perception."
Just as Gödel praises Einstein's work as being the physical evidence of
the unreality of time, McTaggart commends his own work as being an analytic
variant of the proof of time's unreality, as is allegedly demanded by Kant.
In this context McTaggart writes, "I believe that time is unreal. But I
do so for reasons which are not, I think, employed by any of the philosophers
whom I have mentioned (...)."

At this point it would be going too far to expand on McTaggart's proof in detail.
In summary however, it may be said that what McTaggart proves is nothing other
than what Kant had shown long ago: namely not - as McTaggart believed - that
time is absolutely unreal, but rather that time has no reality which is independent
of the subject. This is an important difference. If time has no subject-independent
reality, then it lacks only a certain kind of reality - and
not reality altogether. Thus it is not the case that time is unreal in an indiscriminate
sense, and just a mere illusion. Further, to have no subject-independent reality
is by no means a deficit which devalues time's being in contrast to other things.
As Michael Dummett highlighted in his essay McTaggart's Proof of the Unreality
of Time: A Defence the idea of time as a subject-independent, fully describable
reality is in itself a fiction. A fiction which presupposes that we have access
to a world through which - detached from our finite perceptory conditions -
we connect, in a quasi-devine sense, with entities' inner-being. It is this
fiction which Kant had put an end to.

In contrast to the assumptions made by McTaggart and Gödel in the quotes
mentioned here, it was by no means Kant's aim to question the objectiveness
of time by reducing it to the level of 'illusion' and 'mere appearance'. The
Kantian coupling of time, traditionally conceptualized as a structure of the
world in itself by Newton and Leibniz, with the transcendental subject, is far
more an attempt to base time's objectivity on a new, transcendental plane whilst
considering the justified doubts expressed by Hume about the traditional Leibnizian-Newtonian
view. The point of Kant's reasoning is that time can be unevadable and a priori
- i.e. generally valid and necessary - only when it's proven to be an intersubjective
condition for the possibility of knowledge in general.

Kant accentuates sensible intuition as the fundament of all human knowledge
- this in contrast to the traditional, Platonic idea of knowledge, prevalent
until the time of Leibniz and Newton, according to which only the intelligible
can be a true object of knowledge. This basic proposition is contained in the
first sentence of the Critique of Pure Reason, which reads, "In
whatever manner and by whatever means a mode of knowledge may relate to objects,
intuition is that through which it is in immediate relation
to them, and to which all thought as a means is directed." It is this basic
proposition, of the primacy of intuition as the main condition in enabling of
all human knowledge, which one must consider in order to understand how far
Kant's proof that time is "a pure form of sensible intuition" simultaneously
assures its empirical objectivity and transcendental quasi-universality.

Kant's simple proposition, which Gödel fails to consider along with most
other physicists who've come up against the Kantian conception of time, is that
all knowledge accessible to humankind - and that includes humankind in our pursuing
science (e.g. in physics) - is sensual, that is temporal intuition. Thus Kant
tries to assert the empirical objectivity of time through its transcendental
subjectivism. This connection is expressed in the following, much cited, excerpt
from the Transcendental Aesthetic. First it appears that Kant really
does want to deny time all reality. He writes, "Time is therefore a purely
subjective condition of our (human) intuition (which is always sensible, that
is, so far as we are affected by objects), and in itself, apart from the subject,
is nothing." However, the next sentence, which is mostly omitted in citation,
is decisive. This states, "Nevertheless, in respect of all appearances,
and therefore of all the things which can enter into our experience, it is necessarily
objective." With this in mind, Kant then speaks of the "empirical
reality" of time, that is to say of its "objective validity in respect
of all objects, which allow of ever being given to our senses."

Along with the already mentioned misconception about the unreality of time,
an influential second shortfall distinguishes the reception of Kant's philosophy
of time. Strictly speaking, this shortfall is less a misunderstanding than a
failure to understand, that is to say perceiving the theory with a narrowed
outlook. Decisive aspects of Kant's thinking about time have long been eclipsed,
in the mould of Schopenhauer and Hegel, by its being equated with the treatment
of time in the Transcendental Aesthetic. This equation was addressed,
with recourse to insights gained from Heidegger's book Kant and the Problem
of Metaphysics (1929), by the German philosopher Klaus Düsing in his
Examination of Kant's Theory of Time and its Critical Modern Reception.
As Düsing emphasizes at the beginning of his examination, "Kant's
theory of time is of course contained only incompletely in the Transcendental
Aethetic of the Critique of Pure Reason; essential details of
this theory are found in the following sections (...)." Similarly in §10
of Heidegger's Kantbuch: "The following interpretation will reveal how
time in the course of the development of the several stages of the foundation
of metaphysics comes more and more to the fore and thereby reveals its proper
essence in a more original way than is possible by means of the provisional
characterization in the Transcendental Aesthetic."

The obscuring of Kant's thoughts on time which go beyond the Transcendental
Aesthetic is based on another, profoundly narrowed outlook, upon which Düsing
does not expand. This narrowing of outlook consists in the failure to have apprehended
the fact that Kant himself had not only implicitly but also explicitly relativized
his own transcendental universalization of time. Whilst the transcendental universality
of time in modern philosophy after Kant is retained as a dimension which constitutes
the subjectivity of the subject by both the finite, intentional subject (Husserl)
and the living self of pure duration (Bergson), Kant himself had already questioned
the universality of time which he had initially presupposed. In so doing he
opened up a field of discussion which was further set out by Heidegger and is
currently being addressed by Rorty, Derrida, Lyotard and others.

Kant's relativization of the time, whose transcendental universalization was
completed in the Transcendental Aesthetic, is not found in the Transcendental
Aesthetic itself, but is developed contiguously within the context of his
Transcendental Logic. The distinction which Kant makes, in a footnote
in the B edition of the Transcendental Deduction, between time as a
"form of intuition" and as "formal intuition" is central
here. The distinction to which this footnote relates is already introduced in
the main text. The main text reads, "In the representations of space and
time we have a priori forms of outer and inner sensible intuition;
and to these the synthesis of apprehension of the manifold of appearance must
always conform, because in no other way can the synthesis take place at all.
But space and time are represented a priori not merely as forms of
sensible intuition, but as themselves intuitions which contain a manifold
[of their own], and therefore are represented with the determination of the
unity of this manifold (vide the Transcendental Aesthetic)."
Thus, according to Kant's own understanding, the subject of the Transcendental
Aesthetic is not the form of intuition as such, but a quasi-objective construction:
time as formal intuition.

This is made quite explicit in Kant's annotation. This reads, "Space,
represented as object (as we are required to do in geometry), contains
more than mere form of intuition; it also contains combination of the
manifold, given according to the form of sensibility, in an intuitive
representation, so that the form of intuition gives only a manifold,
the formal intuition gives unity of representation." With an eye
to the Transcendental Aesthetic the annotation continues, "In
the Aesthetic I have treated this unity as belonging merely to sensibility,
simply in order to emphasize that it precedes any concept, although, as a matter
of fact, it presupposes a synthesis which does not belong to the senses but
through which all concepts of space and time become possible. For since by its
means (in that the understanding determines the sensibility) space and time
are first given as intuitions, the unity of this a priori
intuition belongs to space and time, and not to the concept of the understanding."
The conceived unity of time in the Transcendental Aesthetic, which
in the "Transcendental Exposition of the Concept of Time" at the same
time serves as a fundament of the "general doctrine of motion" , in
itself preconceives time as an objectivized, and thus conceptual and categorial
synthesis. It is this unifying, linear conception of time, which may be introduced
"by analogies" in describing "a line progressing to infinity"
, which Kant universalizes in its "empirical reality" not at least
aiming at a new epistemological foundation of Newton's physics.

At the same time however, the second 'concept' of time upon which the concept
of objectivized time is based evades transcendental philosophical explanation.
For time, as a form of intuition in the strict sense, forms the horizon which
Kant fails to illuminate, in which time can first be dealt with as formal intuition.
The universality of the notion of objective time in the Transcendental Aesthetic
is decentralized and at the same time methodically relativized by this horizon's
irrevocable transcendental philosophical dimension. In this context Heidegger
underlines in §9 of his Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant's Critique
of Pure Reason , that, from Kant's perspective, "formal intuition
is not a primordial, but a derived conception." How Heidegger's analysis
of temporality presents itself against the background of this insight is to
be elaborated in the following.

Heidegger developed his analysis of temporality in the second division of the
first part of his Being and Time (1927). In this, Heidegger's early,
still fragmentary master work one must differentiate between two things: the
non-realized, but suggested undertaking of a fundamental ontology, and the factually
accomplished analysis of the Dasein. In the following I shall concentrate on
the analysis of temporality developed in the second division of Being and
Time, which bears the title Dasein and Temporality. The work's
broader perspective of a fundamental ontology is drawn upon only in so far as
it affects the analysis of temporality.

Unlike Husserl and Bergson, who did not directly relate their theories of time
to Kant's, Heidegger's early thinking takes issue directly with Kant. This was
clearly expressed in his lecture, the Phenomenological Interpretation of
Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, in the year Being and Time was
published, as well as in the book Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics,
published in 1929, and in references to Kant found in Being and Time
itself. In directly contesting Kant, Heidegger broke through the theoretical
means of approach to the problem of time, as established by the Critique
of Pure Reason and retained by Bergson and Husserl. With Heidegger, the
question of time as a pure form of sensible intuition - which is left open by
Kant and reformulated by Bergson and Husserl as a question of the intrinsic
temporality in subjectivity - becomes a question of the genuinely practical
means of temporal self-projection in human existence.

'Dasein' is Heidegger's term for what is called 'subject' or 'I think' in Kant.
Heidegger is of the opinion that Kant - in basing it on 'I think' - reduces
the transcendental subject to being an aspect of theoretical knowledge. According
to Heidegger, man is not a creature which aims first and foremost to cognize
the present-at-hand (das Vorhandene). As Dasein, he is far more a being
which has always been cast amidst in its 'there' (Da), and thus did
not first begin artificially and retrospectively to construct an epistemological
relationship to the outside world, but rather one which had always found itself
practically related to a concrete environment - to the "ready-to-hand"
(das Zuhandene). Here Heidegger highlights: "The 'I' is not just
an 'I think', but an 'I think something'." And he explains: "Kant
has indeed avoided cutting the 'I' adrift from thinking; but he has done so
without starting with the 'I think' itself in its full essential content as
an 'I think something', and above all, without seeing what is ontologically
'presupposed' in taking the 'I think something' as a basic characteristic of
the self." This postulate is the 'Being-in-the-world' of Dasein. Since
Kant "did not see the phenomenon of the world" , the basic Heideggerian
insight must continue to obstruct him: "In saying 'I', Dasein expresses
itself as Being-in-the-world."

Like Kant, Heidegger also asks about the conditions of possibility. For him
however, it's not an abstract enquiry about the possible conditions of knowledge,
but quite concretely about the possible conditions of our Being-in-the-world.
In the second division of Being and Time Heidegger reveals that "temporality"
is the basic existential structure forming the fundamental dimension which underlies
the Dasein's structure of care (Sorge), upon which he had expanded
in the first division of Being and Time. With recourse to Kierkegaard
he describes the "double- movement" which effects the Da
('there') in the Dasein, and which opens the world, as a doubly temporal occurence.
The first partial movement in this occuring exists in the anticipation of the
future; the second partial movement in coming back to the present as an openness
for the encountered world determined by the past - or as Heidegger put it, the
"having been." In summary Heidegger writes: "Coming back to itself
futurally, resoluteness brings itself into the Situation by making present.
The character of 'having been' arises from the future, and in such a way that
the future 'has been' (or better, which is 'in the process of having been')
releases from itself the present. This phenomenon has the unity of a future
which makes present in the process of having been; we designate it as 'temporality'."

Here, on the existential level of conditions of possibility, the concern is
not the concrete future, determined by certain substantive aims, but the future
in general, of which is written: "By the term 'futural', we do not here
have in view a 'now' which has not yet become 'actual' and which sometime
will be for the first time. We have in view the coming [Kunft] in which
Dasein, in its ownmost potentiality-for-Being, comes towards itself." Heidegger's
designation of this basic structure of Dasein as "transcendence" has
also given cause to infer theological implications here. Heidegger defended
himself against such a reading of his work from an early stage. Even in his
early lecture The Concept of Time to theologians in Marburg in 1924,
in which he had just formulated the general ideas behind his analysis of temporality,
he emphasized in the Kantian manner: "The philosopher does not believe.
If the philosopher asks about time, then he has resolved to understand time
in terms of time (...)." To understand time in terms of time means
to think about time temporally, or to be in favour of a temporalization of time.
Such is the through and through secular Heideggerian programme, and one must
also understand his designation of "futurality" as being the "coming
[Kunft] in which Dasein, in its ownmost potentiality-for-Being, comes towards
itself" against this backdrop.

Unlike Kierkegaard, for whom the double-movement of human existence only fails
to lead us into desperation when it happens in the consciousness of belief in
God, Heidegger considers successful temporal self-fulfilment to be possible
in the absence of devine transcendence. Heidegger describes the anticipation
of one's own future as a "Being- towards-death" , but he means that
this anticipation of the "possibility of the measureless impossibility
of existence" , which represents death, allows a kind of 'authentic' existence.
A kind of existence in which the experience of a radical finiteness does not
occasion Kierkegaardian desperation, but which rather opens up a new horizon
of manifold possibilities, within which our everyday Dasein was always organized,
without the essential characteristics of its possibilities having entered our
consciousness. This radical view of 'the future as coming towards' (Zu-kunft)
in anticipating one's own death as the "ownmost, non- relational possibility,
which is not to be outstripped" is also understood by Heidegger to be the
self's own "resoluteness" to itself: as authentic "potentiality-for-Being-one's-Self"
(Selbstseinkönnen).

Heidegger contrasts this distinguished basic form of human temporality with
its opposite, or what he calls our "everyday understanding of time."
He attempts to show how the everyday understanding of time arose as a derivative
of the original temporality of human Dasein. Or to put it another way: Heidegger's
goal is to show why and how the objectivized time which we read off our clocks
and calendars arises from the temporal processes of our self-constitution, that
is from the authentic temporality of the double-movement of human existence.
Heidegger's perception is that we can only hold ourselves temporarily - in distinguished
moments of our Dasein - in the authentic temporality, or the resolute anticipation
of death. In the normal run of things we anticipate a future whose content is
determined by our concrete needs and plans, and whose final horizon, death,
is excluded. This reduced, practical everyday form of double-movement is what
Heidegger calls the "inauthentic temporality."

The inauthentic temporality is again different from what Heidegger in §81 of
Being and Time calls "vulgäres Zeitverständnis",
a vulgar or "ordinary conception of time". Whilst in the inauthentic,
practical everyday temporality a "reflect[ion of] the ecstatical constitution
of temporality" can still be sensed, the temporal origin of time from the
temporality of human Dasein is totally obscured in the vulgar conception of
time. Heidegger makes this distinction quite clear through our use of clocks.
He refers here to a paradox which economists and managers of time have yet to
overcome. This paradox is that "precisely that Dasein which reckons with
time and lives with its watch in its hands (...) constantly says 'I have not
time.'" How is it that the greatest strategist of time at once suffers
the greatest stress due to time? Heidegger's answer is: because to this methodical
strategist, time has congealed into a series of nows of exchangable seconds,
minutes, days, weeks, months and years, into a objectivized external authority
of time, that is like an infinitely divisible, endless line which lies before
him and which he can never really succeed in filling. The objectivized time
slips through his fingers. Any time he saves through skillful time management
immediately imposes itself again on him as empty and in need of being filled
with work. It is no longer concrete concerns and needs which dictate planning
of time, rather it is the emptiness itself, which awakens new needs and forces
its own capitalization. Whilst today this form of dealing with time has long
become the norm , Heidegger was still able to view this vulgar conception of
time as being an extreme case, from which the inauthentic temporality could
still be clearly delineated. In the practical context of everyday concerns time
appears to be not exactly an external, nor still the physically determined power
of the clock or "nature-time" , but to be built into our everyday
concerns and determined by these as "world-time".

Heidegger identifies the aspects of datability, tension and publicness as being
the three central characteristics which distinguish inauthentic temporality
from the vulgar conception of time. The Heideggerian standpoint can be shown
particularly clearly by taking datability as an example. Whereas in the vulgar
conception of time the "now- point" (Jetztpunkt) is defined
solely through the immanent relation to other now-points, or through the abstract
relationship earlier/later, time perceived with respect to everyday concerns
is always integrated with concrete regard to daily business, whose datability
is provided by: there is a "now that ..." (Jetzt, da ...).
In this context Heidegger notes: "When we look at the clock and say 'now'
we are not directed toward the now as such but toward that wherefore
and whereto there is still time now; we are directed toward what occupies
us, what presses hard upon us, what it is time for, what we want to have time
for." He concludes from this: "The fact that the structure of datability
belongs essentially to what has been interpreted with the 'now', 'then' and
'on that former occasion', becomes the most elemental proof that what has thus
been interpreted has originated in the temporality which interprets itself.
When we say 'now', we always understand a 'now that so and so ...'
though we do not say all of this. Why? Because the 'now' interprets a making-present
of entities. In the 'now that ...' lies the ecstatical character of the Present.
The datability of the 'now', the 'then' and the 'on that former occasion',
reflects the ecstatical constitution of temporality, and is therefore
essential for the time itself which has been expressed."

In summary it can be said: In Heidegger's differentiation between authentic
temporality, inauthentic temporality and the vulgar conception of time there
is a continuation of the relativization of objective time, which Kant began
with his distinction between time as 'formal intuition' and time as a 'form
of intuition'. Heidegger radicalizes it under the concrete conditions of human
Being-in-the-world. This continuation has a dual aspect. For one, Heidegger
relativizes the objectiveness on which the vulgar conception of time is based
with recourse to the pragmatic, inauthentic temporality which pervades our dealing
with time in relation to daily concerns. On the other hand, Heidegger relativizes
not only the objectiveness on which the vulgar conception of time is based,
but also the pragmatic understanding of time, from which inauthentic temporality
arises. This he does with recourse to the superior and, in his view, fundamental
form of authentic temporality. From this fundamental form of temporality Heidegger
believed he could effect the transition from an analysis of the Dasein to a
fundamental ontology. It simultaneously marks the inner turning point, at which
Heidegger's phenomenology of the temporality of human Dasein is subsumed within
and forcibly enshrouded by the fundamental ontological perspective in Being
and Time.

This last aspect in Heidegger's thinking - the fundamental ontological lapse
into a new time theoretical universalism - was brought to the fore by Rorty
in his Heidegger critique. In his book Contingency, Irony and Solidarity
Rorty writes: "Heidegger seems seriously to have thought, when he was writing
Being and Time, that he was carrying out a transcendental project,
namely, giving an accurate list of the 'ontological' conditions of possibility
of merely 'ontic' states. (...). Just as Kant seems never to have asked himself
how, given the restrictions on human cognition the Critique of Pure Reason
had discerned, it was possible to assume the 'transcendental standpoint' from
which that book was purportedly written, so the Heidegger of this period never
looks into the question of methodological self-reference. He never asks himself
how 'ontology' of the sort he was busy producing was, given its own conclusions,
possible." Rorty adds: "In remarking on this early unselfconsciousness,
I am not trying to denigrate Heidegger's early (internally inconsistent, hastily
written, brilliantly original) book. Heidegger was, after all, not the first
philosopher to have taken his own idiosyncratic spiritual situation for the
essence of what it was to be a human being."

That the Kantian theory of time should only be partially affected by Rorty's
criticism has already been made clear above in reference to the relativization
of time by Kant in the Transcendental Logic. In closing, it can be
shown to be similar for Heidegger. To this end, Rorty's initially positive reading
of Heidegger's incipient intentions is quoted. In connection with this, Rorty
précis the basis of Being and Time as follows: "Heidegger
would like to recapture a sense of what time was like before it fell under the
spell of eternity, what we were before we became obsessed by the need for an
overarching context which would subsume and explain us (...). To put it in another
way: he would like to recapture a sense of contingency, of the fragility
and riskiness of any human project (...)." This productive intention, continues
Rorty, was undermined by Heidegger's absolution of authentic temporality and
its fundamental ontological elucidation.

None the less, an objection to this essentially justified criticism is that
the subsumption of Heidegger's analysis of temporality into a fundamental ontology,
although projected, was not carried out in reality. At the same time rudimentary
attempts to relativize the model of temporal double-movement, i.e. to understand
this temporally in itself, are found in Heidegger's early work on time. This
step, on which Heidegger's work borders in several places, marks the principal
feature of a radical temporalization of time in its full consequence. This radical
temporalization of time, is above all implicitly anticipated in Heidegger's
addressing of "the ideas of Count Yorck" which is found in §77 of
Time and Being. Here Heidegger ascertains positively: "And Yorck
(...) did not hesitate to draw the final conclusion from his insight into the
historicality of Dasein." As evidence Heidegger approvingly quotes from
correspondence between Yorck and Dilthey: "Behaviour and historicality
are like breathing and atmospheric pressure; and - this may sound rather paradoxical
- it seems to me methodologically like a residue of metaphysics to not historicize
one's philosophizing." Heidegger above all explicitly demands the reflexive
temporalization of time in his early lecture The Concept of Time. Heidegger
notes: "(...) we must talk temporally about time. Time ist the 'how'. If
we inquire into what time is, then one may not cling prematurely to an answer
(time is such and such), for this always means a 'what'." And Heidegger
concludes: "Time itself is meaningless; time is temporal."

If one takes Heidegger literally at this point, a description of the Dasein's
temporality may be given free of the fundamental ontological implications engendered
by the singling out of one specific temporal structure as the 'authentic temporality'.
In this way, the bonding of pragmatic temporality with the formal structure
of the temporal double-movement can be retained, without requiring that the
hierarchy of temporal structures, which Heidegger constructs, be overtaken.
This modification is tantamount to a radical pluralization of Heidegger's analysis
of temporality. A plurality is meant here which goes beyond the simple pluralization
which typifies the second basic tendency in contemporary philosophy of time.
This is the case in so far that it no longer attempts to defuse the plurality
of time through the speculative evidence of a negatively conceived unity of
time. Rather, in the language of Musil's metaphor introduced above, the banks
of the river of time are swept along by the radical historization and relativization
of time.

The radical pluralization of time which is seen in Heidegger has two aspects.
First it leads to an internal pluralization in so far as the
Heideggerian time structures are no longer to be understood as being founded
in a hierarchichal context furnished with normative implications (authentic/inauthentic).
With this background, the coupling of pragmatic temporality, temporality based
on certain projections of the future, within the Dasein's temporal double-movement
is to be understood as being a synthesis on a horizon from which future appears
first to be concretely experienceable and in its contingency as compellingly
comprehensible. The modification in the apprehension of the temporal double-movement
is secondly bound to an external pluralization. It no longer
concerns only the temporal structures which Heidegger described, but also incorporates
alternative forms of subjectivity and temporality which can no longer be understood
under the conditions presupposed by Heidegger's "priority of the future."
The range of diverse types of temporality is to be considered here, reaching
from Kant's 'reflective faculty of judgement', Freud's 'free association', via
Proust's 'mémoire involontaire', Benjamin's 'Jetztzeit' and Newman's
'now', through to Lyotard's 'passage' or Derrida's 'écriture'. This spectrum
of time structures is currently being investigated by a multitude of different
authors from the perspective of media philosophy.